Midwives would have managed the induced miscarriages in any society. They would have left themselves opened to the accusations of witchcraft. You cannot imagine that this was not true for most places in medieval Europe and elsewhere.
Now, even if induced miscarriage could always be made to look like accidental miscarriage, and thus be a boon for a man who did not want to have another mouth to feed, it was also opened to accusations by men swept up by intermittent hysteria concerning women’s bodies, their sexuality, their choices, and how to control them, manage them, barter for them as in all business transactions concerning property,which is what women had been and their sexuality was, in the matter of commodity exchange. Marriage was a social institution that arose out of contracts for guaranteed sex.
The presumption here is that men have always understood exactly what was happening if a miscarriage was induced or accidental, but all social masquerades mirror the masks we wear by nature in the form of personality or the variegation of personality, and as an extension of everyone’s many-selves Self.
Denial is as natural as smiling.
The Falling Leaf Review 